Companies like GE may think of the Internet of things in terms of aircraft engines, smart manufacturing, and hospital hygiene systems, but for many of us, the IoT “thing” is a much more prosaic device -- like a Raspberry Pi or an Arduino with off-the-shelf sensors attached. If you want to build cloud applications that talk to these sorts of devices, Amazon Web Services has a lot to offer, not only in terms of SDKs and back-end services, but also starter kits with step by step instructions.

The AWS IoT service includes most of what you need to connect a single-board computer such as an Arduino or Raspberry Pi to the Amazon cloud. It can also be used with laboratory and industrial instruments that can support the protocols. You would typically connect your single-board computer locally to sensors and actuators that read from or act on the physical “thing” being monitored or controlled.